Open and Honest Discussion on Race in America

Nothing says justice is dead [see here] better than the appeal to the mob.

To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America: I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace.’ Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.

And there’s nothing like being fair and impartial to the accused, especially when you can use the innocence of the accused as a foil for the mob’s appeasement.

To those that are angry, hurt or have their own experiences of injustice at the hands of police officers I urge you to channel that energy peacefully as we prosecute this case. I have heard your calls for ‘No justice, no peace,’ however your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of Freddie Gray.

“…justice on behalf of Freddie Gray.” Perhaps a little justice too for the…

The following post is kind of an Op-ed piece about a subject I care a lot about and that I had the opportunity to learn more about recently. Some of my coursework entails researching a free subject relevant to my degree. As I do with all my free assignments, I try to link it up to the fashion industry. One of the topics that I find not only interesting, but kind of shocking in 2015, is the lack of racial diversity among models, whether it’s on the catwalk or in advertisement.

I started thinking about this more and more after Alexander Wang did his much talked about line-up for Balenciaga FW15. Not only did a black girl open the show, but two other models of colour promptly followed. It then turned a tad problematic for me. The following models were mostly Caucasian-looking, before Non-Caucasian models entered the scene in the end. While it’s great…

I could write about the year I spent in downtown Baltimore, when I rode past the above mural every day, when the neighborhood I lived in was serving as the inspiration for the crime show Homicide: Life on the Street. But this is not the time for white people to talk about themselves.

Baltimore Explodes

Baltimore’s anger isn’t just about the death of yet another young black American at the hands of law enforcement it’s about being forgotten and being left with a devastated economy, a broken education system and few options to articulate that frustration.

The city of Baltimore itself is a paradox on the one hand it’s a growing hotspot destination for Millennials well on the other hand it’s home to almost one in four people who live below the poverty line. That level of poverty is due in part to the law some 100,000 factory jobs between 1950 and 1995 Baltimore also has the highest incarceration rate in the state of Maryland and the city has paid about 5.7 million dollars over police brutality lawsuits between 2011 and September 2014.

We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

Journalism as we know it has changed dramatically and permanently. We no longer get all of our information from the legacy media outlets like newspapers or television and can access news from the Internet. There is a problem with this, though, and that problem lies in the fact that because information is now available to anyone, from anywhere, anyone from anywhere can create this news and content. People without the “authority” to report the news are doing just that.

This opens up worlds of issues, and it always comes back to the idea that the every day person – the average Joe – might be able to upload “news” to the internet, but that this is not real journalism because it wasn’t done by someone with the authority to do it, and that makes it amateur and less professional.